Sunday, May 25, 2008

OPENSER Dinner, Vienna - remarks

Very good restaurant - delicious food and local made beer - credits for selection goes to Andreas Granig. Located in the old part, in the city center, the place was somehow protected by the tourists crowd, offering a quite atmosphere.

As we got two visitors from Bratislava, Slovakia, the discussions went global wise. A hot topic (I guess not only there) was the cancellation of VoN show in Amsterdam. What will be the meeting place from now on for the VoIP guys as the VoN disappeared? Who knows, lot and lot of discussions and opinions here and there on the web forums and mailing lists...

Personally I got an update regarding WiMAX, deploying phase started in some countries. Although I know there are still many issues, the pressure of production environments will give more confidence and attract investors and creation of new or better products and solutions for this technology.

And of course, answering many times, again and again, it is VoIP in that dark castle in Transilvania, only SIP, SIP, SIP (I think is actually lower case :-) )...

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Interview: Mysql and Openser

I have found an interesting interview by MySQL with Juha Heinanen, developer and management board member of Kamailio (OpenSER) Project. Targeting the carrier grade deployments, the key components approached are the MySQL cluster and Kamailio (OpenSER), to leverage reliable and distributed storage system for routing large volume of VoIP calls.

See the interview here.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

OPENSER Dinner, Berlin, May 28, 2008

Bound to Asterisk Tag (http://www.asterisk-tag.org) and Linux Tag (http://www.linuxtag.org) events, Henning Westerholt and I will take care of an OPENSER group meeting in Berlin, Germany, May 28 at 20:00.

The place is a small brewery next to Chartlottenburg Castle in Berlin, named Lusinen Brau, the website:

http://www.luisenbraeu.com/

Organized in same idea of casual community meeting, everybody is welcome to join at any time. It is recommended to contact us to announce your participation so you got your seat reserved.

http://www.asipto.com/index.php/contact-us/

Confirmed Participants:
- Henning Westerholt, developer OPENSER, 1&1 Germany
- Elena-Ramona Modroiu, co-founder OPENSER, asipto.com
- Olle E. Johansson, main SIP developer Asterisk, edvina.net
- Dan Bogos, VoIP consultant, itsyscom.com
- Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder OPENSER, asipto.com
- Bogdan Pintea, developer SER, Iptego

Monday, May 19, 2008

OPENSER Workshop, Berlin, May 26-27, 2008

The Asterisk Tag conference hosts two presentations related to OPENSER. In the first day, starting with 4:00pm, will be Asterisk and OpenSER - blending together for scalability. The main focus will be how to plug OPENSER to scales Asterisk-based services.

The next day will be a two hours workshop dedicated to OPENSER. The target is to reveal where OPENSER fits in IP communication services, Voice over IP and beyond, and to give the starting point to use it.

The evening of 28th May will host an OPENSER Social Networking Event at Luisen Brau in Berlin (more details in a new post very soon).

openser.vim

I just found VIM OPENSER syntax specs for configuration file, courtesy of Stanislaw Pitucha. As a heavy VIM user, I am glad to have it available. You can download it from the VIM site.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2242

Friday, May 16, 2008

OPENSER Dinner - Vienna, Austria, May 24, 2008

The OPENSER Dinner to be held in Vienna, Austria, is scheduled for May 24, 2008, 19:30 at Plutzer Brau

http://www.plutzerbraeu.at/plutzerbraeu.html.

Already confirmed the presence:

- Elena-Ramona Modroiu, co-founder OpenSER, COO at http://www.asipto.com
- Andreas Granig, developer OpenSER, CEO at http://www.sipwise.com
- Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder OpenSER, CEO at http://www.asipto.com

See photos from the previous similar event (Barcelona, Spain).

Next event will be in Berlin, in the week with Asterisk Tag and Linux Tag (more details soon).

The OPENSER Dinner series targets local community meetings around the world for social networking and business discussions. If you want to participate (free of charge, everyone pays for its expenses) and secure a seat, contact us at:

http://www.asipto.com/index.php/contact-us/

Thursday, May 15, 2008

OPENSER v1.3.2 Released

New minor release in the series of 1.3 is out as v1.3.2. It includes a bunch of fixes from the time of v1.3.1 release. All running 1.3.x in production should upgrade.

The compatibility is kept at database level and for the configuration file. No need to apply changes, just install the new OPENSER version.

More details at www.kamailio.org.

See detailed changes for this release in ChangeLog file.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

CERF 2008

The biggest IT show in Romania, CERF2008, took place last week at ROMEXPO facilities in Bucharest. I arrived late on Saturday from Barcelona (some pictures here), so I could pay a visit in the last day of the event.

It looked a bit smaller for me than last year. I was focused on communications technologies, and, apart of the big mobile operators and telco here (Romtelecom, Vodafone, Orange, Cosmote) having large exhibition area, very noisy, advertising latest services, giving gifts a.s.o., the companies came with interesting solutions and hardware to demo and present.

I could find several distributors for the major VoIP vendors, especially for phones and SOHO routers: Zyxel, Snom, Polycom, Linksys, DrayTek, Siemens. I can say I was satisfied by the show, comparing with last years, the Open Source seems more popular, the companies offering VoIP solutions, although they might be from other vendors, they do know about Asterisk or Kamailio (OpenSER).

Monday, May 12, 2008

OPENSER Dinner, Barcelona - remarks

May 6, 2008, Barcelona, Spain, OPENSER Social Networking Event at El Glop, in the city center.

A great dinner put together by Jesus Rodriguez (OPENSER developer, FreeBSD package maintainer, CTO at Voztelecom), Daniel-Constantin Mierla (co-founder and developer OPENSER, CEO at asipto.com) and Inaki Baz Castillo (VoIP and OPENSER Consultant at limit.es).

All together were 20 people, including the elite of Spanish VoIP Blogging Army: Jesus Rodriguez (http://www.jerocu.net), Alberto Sagredo (http://www.voipnovatos.es), Sergio Serrano (http://www.asterisktron.org).

Well known to OPENSER and Asterisk environments: Olle E. Johansson, Elena-Ramona Modroiu, Gines Gomes, Elias Baixas, Pascal Maugeri, Victor Pascual Avilla, Nacho Cabrera Ramos.

See some pictures I selected from the ones taken by Alberto Sagredo:
http://www.asipto.com/photos/BARCELONA2008-ALBUM/

Food was excellent (thanks Jesus for selecting the place), so the discussions, as we were staying long after leaving the restaurant to talk outside. Of course, some went to a pub at the usual time in Spain 1:00am.

Next are Vienna and Berlin...

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Bacelona, Barcelona

Third time in Barcelona, same good atmosphere and food. The weather was nice in the first days, ending with heavy raining on Friday afternoon and Saturday.

The training was organized by http://www.avanzada7.com and hosted by http://www.adamvozip.com. Of course, enjoying Olle (http://www.edvina.net) just one week after the class in Orlando, we got to the usual: setting the infrastructure from scratch in the class Monday morning, leaving everything clean on Friday afternoon.

In between, we had yet another challenging week – no class is similar with the previous one – new inquires from the students, other issues brought to discussion, new labs to be solved. We agreed that we do learn a lot, as people coming to the class use Asterisk and Kamailio (OpenSER) is rather different use cases and they face situations we would have never thought.

We were very closed to Sagrada Familia, having nice surroundings for evening walks and dinners. On the 6th we went to Kamailio (OpenSER) Social Networking Event. A new post here and couple of photos on http://www.asipto.com will reflect that evening.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

OPENSER Dinner - El Glop, Barcelona, May 6, 2008

The OPENSER dinner in Barcelona, Spain, May 6, 9:00PM, takes place at "Braseria El Glop".

http://www.elglop.com/

There will be about 20-25 persons, among them:

- Olle E. Johansson, main Asterisk SIP developer, CEO at http://www.edvina.net
- Elena-Ramona Modroiu, co-founder OpenSER, COO at http://www.asipto.com
- Jesus Rodriguez, developer OpenSER -- FreeBSD packages maintainer, CTO at http://www.voztele.com
- Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder OpenSER, CEO at http://www.asipto.com
- Inaki Baz Castillo - OpenSER mailing list activist, VoIP consultant
- Alberto Sagredo - http://www.voipnovatos.es
- several other openser, wesip (http://www.wesip.com) and asterisk folks

Sunday, May 4, 2008

OPENSER Book

Just returning from my trip in Florida, I am catching up with some events happening around the project.

First book about OPENSER was published by Packt Publishing, authored by Flavio E. Goncalves. I did technical review of the book and waiting now for the hardcopy version of it. More details at:

http://www.packtpub.com/building-telephony-systems-with-openser/book

Friday, May 2, 2008

Oracle Support

Courtesy of Iouri Kharon, a new developer, the development branch of OPENSER includes now native support for connecting to ORACLE databases. Previously possible via UNIXODBC driver, the new module named db_oracle brings more flexibility when using this powerful database server.

The readme of the module is available at:
http://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/devel/db_oracle.html

The module will be include in next major release 1.4.0.

Trip in Florida

Starting with 19th of April, I spent almost twoo weeks in Florida. Arriving 2 days before the SIP Masterclass in Orlando held together with Olle E. Johansson allowed accommodation with the time zone. Also, we had the time to do the shoppings for the course.

First Sunday we headed to Cape Canaveral to visit the NASA Space center. Having my sister a researcher and PhD in Astro-Physics (blogging in Romanian about this at http://blogsolar.blogspot.com/), I have been pretty much in touch with this field. However, the center is impressive, movies about the history of astronautics and the trips in space, rockets and shuttles at real size, the assembly room, launch pads, a.s.o.

Monday to Friday was mostly about the course, with people from USA, Columbia, Peru and Canada, enjoying very much discussion about real world deployments and issues. During an evening, we had a quick tour at Universal Studio, another big attraction of Orlando.

Once course finished, without visiting the Disney World (next time…), I moved to Miami and spent 3 challenging days with friends, including one BBQ on the beach.

I left Florida for going to Bucharest for one and a half day before flying to Barcelona for another SIP Masterclass hosted by http://avanzada7.com/.